In October, I visited Hong Kong for the first time, where my partner has family. That holiday is the reason this post is a little late.
It also made me think a lot about political narratives, false binaries, and what it takes to imagine a just and sustainable world.
First impressions
It was both uncanny and humbling to be in Hong Kong as a white British person at this juncture in its history.
Relics of colonialism are common. Cafes serve eggs on toast and black tea with milk. Place names like “Queen’s Street” and “Stanley” helped me to navigate easily despite my non-existent Cantonese.
But we are in the 21st century, not the 20th or 19th, and the idea that Brits once governed such a place has a trace of the absurd about it. For a start, the ease, efficiency, and cleanliness of Hong Kong’s public infrastructure and services feels decades ahead.
Pass the politics
As we explored the streets and spoke with local friends and family, I felt the gravitational pull of global politics.
I was told that Hong Kong has changed noticeably since 2020 – owing both to the government’s crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in 2019 and its subsequent pandemic lockdown, implemented in step with China’s strict Covid policy.
The topic is a trapdoor, which drops us from gentle conversational terrain into a dark, stuffy space, filled with serious themes.
Is there greater merit in authoritarian planning and state-led development or democratic checks and balances and a liberalised market? How do the United States and China compare in their aggressive foreign policy and systematic violations of human rights?
Hong Kong’s territory and culture are rich and expansive, but talking about its political path can feel claustrophobic. Ideology sucks up the oxygen.
The powerful of this world seek to control narratives, to fortify their base and defuse their opponents’ attacks. Their victims are the global community, empathy, and a nuanced understanding of history. The middle between the poles – and the people whose lives and stories it is made of – is erased from the picture.
Take the Hong Kong Museum of History’s free exhibition on National Security. When I visited, the rest of the Museum was closed temporarily for a revamp. The exhibition – organised by the Committee for Safeguarding National Security of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, no less – gives a flavour of what’s in store.
A section on ‘political security’ reads:
“The core of political security is to safeguard the leadership and ruling position of the Communist Party of China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics. This is the common responsibility of all the people of China, including the people of Hong Kong.
“If political security cannot be guaranteed… the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation [will not] be possible.”
The exhibition continues with an account of the pro-democracy protests of 2019 and a resounding validation of the Security Law passed in 2020 (which created the Committee):
“The Hong Kong version of ‘colour revolution’ in 2019 completely demonstrates that local organisations and individuals are willing to serve as agents of overseas political organisations or intelligence organisations and engage in acts and activities that endanger national security.”
Like all regimes that seek absolute control, foreign influence is key to the story. There can be no space for a genuine domestic opposition.
The middle is missing – or perhaps it is there, shrouded by tear gas.
I think about the distorting binaries created and maintained by the most powerful as I look ahead to the next UN climate change conference (COP29), which will convene from 11-24 November in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Global talks on climate and, lately, nature, have frayed and stumbled, as always, on the issue of money.
Rich countries have failed to provide finance that matches the scale of the task. Yet some countries and groups producing fossil fuels in the Global South still cynically play up a purported trade-off between climate action and economic development. And the show goes on.
In the middle are the populations of climate-vulnerable regions and states, Indigenous Peoples, youth around the globe, and all kinds of societally marginalised groups, all of whom stand to gain the most from a just and sustainable world but wield much less power to bring it about.
Finding the space in between
A friend from Hong Kong with knowledge of the pro-democracy movement characterised three political camps when we spoke.
One favours China, while a second – led by an old guard of activists and politicians and portrayed by Western media – wants an ‘internationalist’ Hong Kong.
Our friend doesn’t subscribe to either, but instead takes a ‘localist’ view, which emphasises Hong Kong’s citizens’ rights to their own land, culture, and governance.
In the past, I have joined the chorus for an international Hong Kong, planting a flag without ever having set foot there myself. I wrote about the pro-democracy demonstrations in 2014 for the New Statesman.
Back then, I didn’t know about the role played by urban farming in that movement. Farmers cultivated plots at protest sites and planted seasonal produce (cleared shortly after the tents came down) to raise hard questions about urban development.
Our friend is now involved in a support network and marketplace for local organic farmers in the territory, part of a new wave to claim some sovereignty over Hong Kong’s land for its people.
Nevertheless, the dominant vision of the future that Hong Kong presents is technologically enabled and hyper-commercial.
This is the image I saw in shopping malls integrated with transport hubs, packed with luxury international brands, and connected to office buildings and hotels via elevated, air-conditioned walkways. I saw it in the adverts broadcast to commuters on the metro (MTR) platform via embedded LED screens and speakers. And I saw it in Hong Kong’s residents, eyes fixed on their phone screens even as they power-walk towards their next appointment.
Modernity in the city forms like layers of sediment on a bedrock of history. That history is mined and molded by different sides with an agenda to push, but many people never dig down far enough to find out.
Beneath it all are the irrefutable, authentic claims that communities have to the safety of their lives and livelihoods. These claims will be made by the righteous against the powerful as COP29 kicks off next week.
Hong Kong made me despair at times, for the rooted feeling so often lost in the world’s centres of finance and commerce, where great powers jostle for position and development knows no bounds.
But in the end, I confess: it delighted me. To watch it all unfold, in the messy, layered, glorious way that human societies do – and to finally hear the Hong Kong story aloud, in real time.
Okay I couldn’t help scan reading it all quickly for the first time and just wanted to say how much I resonate with how many parallels this has to everything EVERYTHING I “believe in” (like, believe I believe in and also what do I wilfully ignore and not know I don’t know etc) and found it such a beautiful graceful and tbh fuckin funny way to tell the truth of it: “In the past, I have joined the chorus for an international Hong Kong, ✨✨planting a flag without ever having set foot there myself.” ✨✨✨✨✨